2017
Opening Day is a four-part series of artistic interventions housed in the common space on the top floor of Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre (USSC). Jointly organized by Selene Yap and Cheng Jia Yun, opening day will feature the responses of artists Chua Chye Teck, Lai Yu Tong, Susie Wong and Sookoon Ang.
The project is titled after local poet Arthur Yap’s piece that sketches elements of a newly opened building: balmy recycled air, stainless steel, silvered tiles. A quiet observation of new materials, structures and novel facilities, the poem speaks of a period in Singapore when urban renewal and feverish building construction were deemed essential to a developing nation.
Like the poem published in Yap’s 1977 anthology Commonplace, USSC was built in the late 1970s when shopping complexes were just beginning to make their presence felt on the Singapore landscape. Yet in the subsequent decades of its life, USSC has faded fast, outshone by malls which come equipped with 10-theatre cineplexes and/or 25-aisle super marts.
As a project, Opening Day seeks to occupy a void and thereby open up the site for comment and contemplation, working closely with these artists to glean their responses to the ideas of time, space and dislocation.
2 – 14 Dec: Chua Chye Teck | Let the Dust Settle
16 – 29 Dec: Lai Yu Tong | Everything Is Tasteless or Too Sweet
3 – 16 Jan: Susie Wong | Take Care of Me
18 – 31 Jan: Sookoon Ang | Always & Forever
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Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre
756 Upper Serangoon Road, #04-00
Singapore 534626